Highlights
– Department of Justice’s 2010 budget outlines some new high-tech programs
– FBI’s new electronic surveillance program designed to help the agency deal with changing communications technology
– Proper oversight by Congress and agency department heads critical to ensuring programs adhere to laws
The Department of Justice released its budget requests for 2010 on May 7, 2009. Included in it were three high-tech programs the department hopes will improve its collection, analysis and information sharing on criminal and terrorist suspects. The high-tech programs include a new “Advanced Electronic Surveillance” program for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the development of the Biometric Technology Center, and a terrorist information-sharing program for INTERPOL – the international anti-crime organization.
While the programs will help the agencies handle the enormous amounts of intelligence information traversing the airwaves and cyberspace, we expect civil rights groups to scrutinize the constitutional and privacy implications posed by the new measures.
Warrantless Wiretaps Still the Issue
In December 2005, the New York Times broke the story on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) warrantless surveillance program on United States (US) citizens. Under the NSA’s “terrorist surveillance program”, the agency was authorized to monitor phone calls, e-mails, Internet activity, text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the US even if the other end of the communication was located within the US.
Many privacy advocates fear some of the new programs funded and developed by the DOJ could lead to similar instances of warrantless eavesdropping on US citizens. The DOJ argues that it is trying to keep pace with new technologies being used by criminals and terrorists. While technology will make the DOJ and the agencies underneath the department better equipped to track suspects and develop links between terrorist and organized crime members, we remain concerned that those same agencies may overstep their legal authority and reignite the debate associated with the monitoring of private communications.
FBI Develops New Electronic Surveillance Program
Long criticized for its slow reforms after the 9/11 attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is currently developing a new “Advanced Electronic Surveillance” program which is being funded at US$233.9 million for 2010. The program is dubbed “Going Dark” and will enhance the agency’s electronic surveillance intelligence collection and evidence gathering capabilities. The program is designed to help the agency deal with changing technology and ways to intercept phone calls such as those used by Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) phones or Internet telephony programs such as Skype.
The program is also conducting research on ways to conduct automated analysis to look for links between subjects of surveillance and other current or past investigative suspects. The automated analysis by computers could help investigators uncover large criminal operations or terrorist plots.
Similar to the NSA, the biggest challenge for the FBI and DOJ to overcome is not necessarily the collection of evidence but the analysis of it, an often overwhelming task. Today, criminal and terrorist investigations are often made up of gigabytes or terabytes of digital evidence. This has put a great demand on the agency to increase its data mining and digital analysis capabilities to find the important pieces of information to build a comprehensive case.
Plans For A New Biometric Technologies Center
Also included in the DOJ’s 2010 budget is the cost of building a new US$97 million dollar center dedicated to researching and developing new biometric technologies. The center will be a joint effort between the FBI and the Department of Defense (DoD) to develop projects such as the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI). NGI will be a vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which is expected to come online in 2010.
Efforts to catalog and centralize a person’s biometric data will help federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies solve more cases with greater efficiency and accuracy after this type of evidence is gathered at a crime scene. Vast depositories of intimate personal information kept by the government will face major rights group scrutiny, particularly in terms of safeguarding that information.
Funding for INTERPOL’s Terrorist Information Sharing Program
DOJ’s budget request also includes a program called Project Vennlig – a terrorist information-sharing program run by the organization. The program was initiated by the US DoD to obtain criminal information about insurgents killed or captured in Iraq. The program gathers information from insurgent’s cell phones and documents found in their possession. The goal of the program is to obtain and integrate the information collected in a manner that can be disseminated to INTERPOL member countries so that each can proactively target terrorist groups and members.
All of these programs will play an important role in fighting crime and terrorism, but the key to their success will be proper oversight by members of Congress and the heads of these agencies to ensure the civil and privacy rights of US citizens are not overrun.
